Clinton Enters ’08 Field, Fueling Race for Money

Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, shown in July, are vying for favor from the same groups, including women and blacks.Credit
Evan Vucci/Associated Press

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton jumped into the 2008 presidential race yesterday, immediately squaring off against Senator Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic field in what is effectively the party’s first primary, the competition for campaign donations.

“I’m in,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail message to supporters early yesterday. “And I’m in to win.”

If successful, Mrs. Clinton, 59, would be the first female nominee of a major American political party, and she would become the first spouse of a former president to seek a return to the White House.

Her entrance into the race followed Mr. Obama’s by less than a week, and highlighted the urgency for her of not falling behind in the competition for money, especially in New York, her home turf, where the battle has already reached a fever pitch. It also set off rounds of e-mail messages and conference calls among both her allies and opponents.

George Soros, the billionaire New York philanthropist, has made maximum donations in the past to both candidates, for instance, and last week he faced a choice: support Mr. Obama, who created his committee on Tuesday, or stay neutral and see what Mrs. Clinton and others had to say. In this case, Mr. Obama won.

Mr. Soros sent the maximum contribution, $2,100, to Mr. Obama, the first-term senator from Illinois, just hours after he declared his plans to run.

“Soros believes that Senator Obama brings a new energy to the political system and has the potential to be a transformational leader,” said Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Mr. Soros.

Mrs. Clinton’s presidential operation is only one day old, but she already finds herself in a breakneck competition against Mr. Obama for fund-raising supremacy in two towns that she and her husband have mined heavily for political gold: New York and Hollywood. Mr. Obama’s entrance into the race has also put up for grabs other groups that are primary targets for Mrs. Clinton, including African-Americans and women.

At this early stage in the nomination fight, securing donations and signing up fund-raisers are among the best ways of showing political strength in a crowded field (seven Democrats and counting). And Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton are looking to raise at least $75 million this year alone.

Advisers said yesterday that they had begun corralling donors to build quickly on the formidable $14 million that Mrs. Clinton already had in the bank. They predicted that they would outpace Mr. Obama, though they acknowledged that he is moving impressively to try to match Mrs. Clinton’s national fund-raising network, which has been in the making far longer than his.

Mrs. Clinton faces some fatigue among donors after more than 15 years of Clinton fund-raising, Democratic contributors and strategists said, and some skepticism about whether she can win. Yet she has the Democrats’ most popular rainmaker at her full disposal, former President Bill Clinton, and she has influential friends like the lawyer and power broker Vernon E. Jordan Jr. to help keep African-American donors and others by her side.

Notably, no prominent Clinton fund-raiser has moved to Mr. Obama’s camp (though his aides are working on it). Mrs. Clinton has also lined up a powerful roster of fund-raising and economic advisers in New York, including the financiers Roger Altman, Steven Rattner, Blair W. Effron, Alan Patricof and Mr. Rattner’s wife, Maureen White, a former finance chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

“Maureen and I will happily do everything we can to help her,” Mr. Rattner said. “Based on our long relationship with her, we feel that she has demonstrated incontrovertibly that she would be an effective candidate and a terrific president.”

For all of the attention swirling around Mr. Obama, meanwhile, he faces many obstacles as he seeks to become the nation’s first black president. His background, including a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, has elevated his appeal, but it does little to answer questions about whether he has the experience to serve in the White House.

Picking off Clinton loyalists is no easy task, either. Hours after opening his fund-raising committee on Tuesday, Mr. Obama convened separate conference calls with donors in Chicago and on the East and West Coasts; in the East Coast phone call, according to participants, Mr. Obama asked them to keep an open mind about his candidacy even if they had been allies of Mrs. Clinton.

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Clintons Web site, HillaryClinton.com, Saturday morning.

James Torrey, chairman of the global hedge fund Torrey Funds, said he signed on with Mr. Obama not as a snub to Mrs. Clinton, but because he believed that the Illinois senator had the best chance of inspiring Democrats and other voters.

“I know it’s perceived as an anti-Hillary thing,” Mr. Torrey said in an interview Friday. “I think she’s marvelous, I think she’s a great senator, but I’d rather see Barack Obama as president. I think the Republicans will make it their life’s work to bring her down.”

Several New York and Hollywood donors offered a similar assessment: they liked Mrs. Clinton as a senator, but worried that her rating in a new Washington Post/ABC News Poll released Saturday was at 41 percent, despite having nearly 100 percent name recognition.

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Some of her veteran supporters in New York are now on the fence, including the business executives Orin S. Kramer and Robert Zimmerman, who are active in Democratic politics. Others say they plan to play it safe and contribute to both candidates. In Los Angeles, the producers David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg are working to plan a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama after he officially enters the race, which he is scheduled to do on Feb. 10. Mr. Geffen has signed on with Mr. Obama, while Mr. Katzenberg and Mr. Spielberg have not decided which candidate to formally endorse.

Yet hedging bets with a spread of donations could prove perilous with the Clinton camp, said Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator who is president of the New School.

“The Clintons value loyalty, and I don’t think they are going to risk offending her,” Mr. Kerrey said of Mrs. Clinton’s traditional supporters, noting that he spoke to several undecided Democrats last week. Referring to Mr. Obama, he added: “He’s got to reach out to Hillary’s supporters and hope he can persuade some of them. If he doesn’t, she’s the nominee.”

Mr. Zimmerman said he was enthusiastic about Mrs. Clinton. Asked why he had not aligned with her yet, he said: “It’s appropriate and respectful to hear every candidate’s message.”

Mr. Obama is putting together his own finance team to focus on New York. He has hired Julianna Smoot, who helped tap Wall Street money as part of a record-setting team at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee under Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York. He has also dispatched a fund-raiser, Jenny Yeager, to run his New York operation, and he is calling on Robert Wolf, chairman of UBS Americas, to raise money. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Wolf, who has donated to Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats, confirmed that he planned to help Mr. Obama.)

In New York, chief executives, lawyers, entertainers, gay men and lesbians, African-Americans and women have been prominent in political fund-raising for decades — though usually they are picking among outsiders, not hometown friends and allies. Yet the 2008 race will test personal and political loyalties, with Mrs. Clinton preparing to announce a run and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and perhaps former Gov. George E. Pataki moving to seek the Republican nomination. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is also being encouraged to run as an independent.

The attention given to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama is making fund-raising that much more difficult for other Democrats. While former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina still hopes to tap into a network of supporters among trial lawyers, his former profession, and to build an army of grass-roots donors, strategists for other candidates conceded that raising money would be an uphill battle and said it was an open question whether there was room for more than one alternative to Mrs. Clinton.

“I just got off the phone with someone who said, ‘It’s between Edwards and Obama,’ and with a little nudging I pushed him over to the Obama camp,” said Jeh Johnson, a partner at the Paul, Weiss law firm in New York who has been making fund-raising calls on behalf of Mr. Obama.

Mr. Johnson, who was general counsel for the Air Force in the Clinton administration, said younger Democrats and women — crucial parts of Mrs. Clinton’s base — were excited about Mr. Obama. “I haven’t encountered many New Yorkers who say, ‘No, I’m not interested, I’m a Hillary supporter,’ ” he said.

The competition for supporters — and contributors — extends well beyond New York. And Mr. Obama could complicate Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raising efforts in Chicago, another lucrative base for Democrats. In her Senate re-election bid last year, she raised nearly $700,000 from Illinois, her native state.

One Democratic operative, who has knowledge of Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raising operation in the Midwest, called donors in Chicago last week after Mr. Obama’s announcement, asking whether it would be foolhardy to sign onto the Clinton campaign if he was in the race. While party officials say Mr. Obama will have an advantage in Chicago, they said Mrs. Clinton would still find considerable support there.

While Mr. Obama has never run a national campaign, his political action committee, the Hopefund, has attracted a broad base of contributors from across the country.

In the New York entertainment industry, too, Mr. Obama’s candidacy has received raves. Hours after his announcement Tuesday, the Broadway producer Margo Lion sent out an e-mail message urging her friends to donate to him — making clear that the theater community was not locked down by Mrs. Clinton.

“Along with many others in the industry, I will be producing a fund-raiser at the St. James Theater later this spring” for Mr. Obama, Ms. Lion wrote. “We need to find a new direction for our country, and finally, we have the man to do it.”

Correction: January 24, 2007

Because of an editing error, a front-page article on Sunday about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential candidacy misstated the name of the university whose president, former Senator Bob Kerrey, commented on campaign donors. It is the New School, not the New School University.

Correction: June 1, 2007

A front-page article on Jan. 21 about the presidential prospects of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton referred incorrectly to the results of a Washington Post/ABC News poll on Jan. 19. The poll found that Mrs. Clinton had the support of 41 percent of Democrats questioned, not a favorability rating of 41 percent among all respondents. (Her favorability rating among all of those questioned was 54 percent.) The error was pointed out on Wednesday in a posting on the Web site of Media Matters for America.

Patrick Healy reported from New York, and Jeff Zeleny from Washington. Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from New York.

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